The Broken State Of Modern Education - Dr Phil

Dr. Phil McGraw is a television personality, author, psychologist, and podcaster. School is supposed to prepare young people for the big wide world. Not just with knowledge but also with life skills. Given that youth mental health is at an all-time low while reading and maths abilities are hugely behind, what is actually happening inside modern schools? Expect to learn why the education system is so broken, who is designing the downfall of society, the problem with inclusive language, what role the algorithm has on our worldview, why there is an attack on family values, Dr Phil's principles to take back control, and much more... - 00:00 What’s Happening in Mainstream Academia? 06:03 The Unintended Consequences of Technology 13:33 Young People Are Becoming Less Patriotic 17:55 Why Glorifying Victimhood is So Dangerous 26:34 The Problem With Inclusive Language 33:47 How Much of These Issues Are Coordinated? 42:31 Are People Less Open-Minded Today? 50:12 The Current Attack on the Family Unit 56:19 Principles for Becoming More Resilient 1:04:59 Conclusion - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  It seems like you're throwing yourself into the thick of it here. You're pushing back against a lot of ideas that are very popular in your industry of mainstream media. Does it feel like a bit of a war zone?

• 0:11Speaker 01

  Sometimes it does. It seems like the more commonsensical I get, the more I rattle people's cages, but that's okay. I'm used to it.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  I saw a study recently of Illinois Public Schools in 2022 that found zero students passed the state math proficiency test at 53 public schools, almost all of whom are majority black. And at one school, which is a prep school designed to prepare students for their medical careers, the per student spending is $47,000. For reading, it's only 30 schools, and only one out of 10 kids or less can do math at a grade level in 930 schools, which is more than a quarter of all of the schools in the state. What do you think's happening with academia?

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Well, that's a complex question that requires a complex answer, but I can tell you the result of it is, as a country, we're certainly not leading academically the way we have in the past, whether it's math, science, reading, whatever. We're just simply not leading the charge. And I can add to what you've said by saying that nationally,

• 1:28Speaker 01

  over 30% of 5th graders can't read at the most basic level. 30% of 8th graders can't read at the most basic level. But what's happening is they're continuing to get passed on to the next grade and the next grade and the next grade. And that's happening, I guess, because they get paid for passing the kids, moving on to the next grade. But

• 1:57Speaker 01

  I mean, if you're not reading on grade, on grade level at the third or fourth grade, your chance of dropping out before you graduate goes up like four times normal. And if, if, and there are some groups that it goes up six times normal. So if we can't at least get these kids reading, we're in a lot of trouble educationally in this country. And it doesn't seem like anybody's got a good plan to do anything about it because it's being acknowledged kind of superficially, but nobody does anything about it.

• 2:37Chris Williamson?

  Well, kids are going to school unless there's some secret attendance rate changes that I've not seen. Kids are attending, you know, from whatever it is, nine AM until three thirty PM. They are in classrooms with a teacher and the teacher is saying things to them.

• 2:55Chris Williamson?

  I don't understand what is happening if basic reading and maths competence isn't being met.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Well, a lot of these school systems have adopted programs of, of teaching subject matters that just simply didn't work. And there was no empirical data to suggest that it would work, but yet they spent millions and millions of dollars on these teaching programs that just simply don't work. But they've embraced them. They've spent money on them. They put time into them, but they're not yielding the results.

• 3:33Chris Williamson?

  What are these, what are these programs? What are they?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Well, they're programs that they buy commercially. Somebody comes up and they said, okay, we're going to, you know, we're going to take this approach to teaching reading, you know, whether it's phonetics here or it's another word structure here, or it's a, it's a math approach here. And you have to look at this stuff to see, okay, we have a competency level when we start. Then you get to the other end and you say, all right, let's check competency and see how much they've gained in terms of competency on an objective test, not one administered by the vendor, but on an objective test, how much competency have they gained? How much have they mastered the subject matter?

• 4:19Speaker 01

  And if it's, if it's not a substantial increase, then they need to do something different. And when you talk about Illinois and they're using the state test and it's not showing competency with these kids, you can't continue to do the same thing. And, you know, there are a lot of these programs out there that just simply aren't showing competency from state to state. Um, and they need to change. They need to do something different. Now, one of the things that I'm concerned about is when COVID hit, um, there were some really bad decisions made that created

• 5:06Speaker 01

  bad results mentally, emotionally, developmentally, socially, educationally, um, that those gaps have not been closed. Some progress has been made, but not near enough to close that gap. So if they weren't doing great to begin with, and then they shut the schools down for two years and create a gap, and that gap hasn't been closed, now you've got kids that are going to really be frustrated in being behind the curriculum. And so they wind up being demotivated. And I, I, I think it was a bad decision to shut it down the way they shut it down. I said so at the time.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  I say so now, and I think we're going to pay the price for that. This generation is going to be behind, um, for their entire life if something doesn't happen to close the gap.

• 6:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you say that trends that we're seeing aren't the result of society's natural evolution, but they've been unquestioningly designed to undermine our society in general and the family unit in particular. If that's right, who is designing them?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Well, it depends on which area you're talking about. Let's talk about, for example, both unintended consequences and intended consequences. I think, for example, if we recognize that, right now, we're seeing a generation that is dealing with the Internet, the technology of the smartphone, the technology of iPads and access to information, that a generation ago, simply wasn't there.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Now, some of this is by design, some of it is unintended consequences. For example, I started The Dr. Phil Show in 2002. I started being on television several years before that. But when I started The Dr. Phil Show, the first text message had never been sent. There weren't any text messages. It wasn't a thing. They didn't do that. Think how much things have changed since then. Because about 08, 09, it's like, big airplanes flew over the United States and just dropped smartphones on this society.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  And I think that was the biggest change in the human race since the Industrial Revolution. Think about what happened with the Industrial Revolution. Up until that point, we were very much an agricultural society, right? We farmed, we grew the foods that we ate, and that was the cycle. And so, like, 95% of society was agricultural. Okay, then you move forward 25 years, and maybe it's dropped now. But then, when the Industrial Revolution hit, everything got mechanized, people moved into the city, and a lot of changes took place.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Nothing has changed the human race like that until the advent of the Internet and the smartphone. And when that smartphone hit, and we're walking around with computers in our hands, what happened? Everybody went from walking around like this, to walking around like this. And young people stopped living their lives and started watching other people live their lives. And something happened when that occurred. They started comparing their lives to the lives they were watching lived out on the internet, on social media platforms. And so they started comparing themselves.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  What they didn't realize is the lives they were watching were fiction. They were fantasies. These influencers that we have, and I can't tell you how many I've had on that say, yeah, I'll post things up and say, okay, I'm gonna wear this, I'm gonna wear that, and I'm going to the NBA All-Star game tonight, and I'm doing this, I'm doing that. They put all those clothes on, they take all those videos, they post them all up, then they take those clothes off, they take them back to the store and get a refund because they couldn't afford to buy them to begin with. They aren't going to the NBA All-Star game to be, to start with, that's just all a fiction. So this kid's sitting home watching like, you know, who, I'm nothing, I'm not going

• 9:55Speaker 01

  to any All-Star game, I don't have those kind of clothes. And so their self-esteem takes a beating, and they're comparing it to somebody that's doing the same damn thing they're doing, which is sitting home in a beanbag eating Cheetos. They're doing the same thing as the other person is. But they don't know that because they're 16. So their self-esteem takes a beating, their self-worth takes a beating, and they don't have friends because they're watching lives lived instead of living their own. You know, the average teenager has like one or less really good friend because their lives are being lived virtually. Okay, so, you know, that's maybe an unintended consequence.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  You said, okay, so who is it that's got these conspiracies that are after us? Well, let's look at the social media companies, for example. People know that their kids spend too much time on social media. What they don't know is that those are driven by algorithms. And those algorithms are feeding these children content that is designed to upset them.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  They're not giving them content they want to see. They're not giving them content that uplifts them. They're giving them content that upsets them mentally and emotionally. Why? Because that gets them clicking more. And the more they click, the longer they're on, the longer they're on, the more ads they can run by them. The more ads they run by them, the more shared rev they have. So there have been studies done where they'll put a 13-year-old girl up because it meets the requirements and they'll just put her name up. And within minutes, she's getting toxic content about losing weight or doing this or doing that.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  They'll put the same profile up and in the description, they'll say weight loss. And the amount of toxic content that algorithm feeds her goes up six times, eight times, 10 times as much. She starts getting feedback about 400 calorie diets. She starts getting anorexia sites. She starts getting all kinds of things fed at her. And she starts click, click, click because it's making her anxious and upset. Now that is by design. And there's no consideration for the welfare of the child who they know it creates anxiety.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  It creates depression and it gets the kid hooked in. And now they're addicted to the content. They're addicted to the phone. It pulls them away from their family. And the longer they're on there, the more susceptible they are to predators. The more susceptible they are to these other influences. And that's eroding the overall fiber of the family. So all of these things combined, you've got people that they start dating later. They start driving later. They, all of the things that we did at a younger age.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  When I was 15 years old, 355 days and 23 hours, I was down at the DMV waiting to get my driver's license. Now they're not in any big hurry because they're not really engaged in the world. That's not a good thing.

• 13:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it seems like most of the information that people get on the internet at the moment is built not to teach them about the world or tell them anything that's true, but to just be the most viral, memetically absorbable messaging that they can. And what you see with this is messages that are the most viral are the ones that go the furthest, not the ones that are the most accurate. A good example of this would be, America is a bad country. It's uniquely cursed or toxic or malign in some way. And you put a really interesting study up about patriotism on the decline, and that's just falling through the floor.

• 14:13Chris Williamson?

  It's a tiny, a tiny amount compared, it's like half, less than half of what it was only a short while ago.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's shocking. I mean, that's, that's shocking. And, and that's troubling to me because I love this country. I mean, I really do. Is it perfect? Of course not. I mean, we, we've got things we need to work on, but I love this country and I love it enough to acknowledge that there are problems with it. But there are things that we need, we need to acknowledge them in order to work on them. But there are things that you put on your to-do list. It's not things that you reject the entire American experiment because it's not perfect. It's just things you put on your to-do list, things that you want to do a better job of.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  But, yeah, I've said that I think a lot of these elite universities right now are not teaching critical thinking. You've got a lot of this ideology that is, it sounds to me a lot like socialism, sounds to me a lot like Marxism, teaching that we're, that we're going to be successful when we have a quality of outcome. That's insane. You're gonna, you're never gonna have a quality of outcome because you have different qualities of input.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  You have some people that work hard, you have some people that don't. You have some people that are smart and talented, you have some people that aren't. You have different levels of input, you're gonna have different quality of outcome. And when you've got universities that are teaching, which it seems to me to be astoundingly hypocritical, you've got elite universities that are charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for an elite education, and then they're teaching that there should be a quality of outcome. Well, if that's true, why am I paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars for an elite education? If we're all supposed to come out the same, then what the hell I need to be paying you all this for? I can just go hang out on a corner, and we're all gonna get the same thing. What

• 16:22Speaker 01

  do I need to be paying you this for?

• 16:24Chris Williamson?

  Well, the universities definitely seem to be good at teaching students to be victims, or that getting their feelings hurt by words and being injured by something that someone said to you should be a big deal.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they're medicalizing those feelings. You know, we used to get our feelings hurt. So, okay, sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me. But now, they've medicalized that. So, when they say, okay, this professor asked me to write a paper that's contrary to my value system, and I'm offended, so I've now entered the offendedness sweepstakes, and I'm telling you that that's mentally and emotionally hurt me. So, it's like the intentional infliction of emotional distress. You go file that complaint with the dean's office, they've now got to deal with that. And so, we've had more professors

• 17:21Speaker 01

  fired and disciplined in the last several years than we've had since the McCarthy era, because the students have learned how to word all of this in such a way that it has to be dealt with. Because if a student commits suicide, or hurts themselves in some way, and the university didn't deal with it, now they have a liability problem. So, professors are getting caught up in that. Now, some of them are jerks. You know, some professors do jerky things, and probably need to be, but not as many as we're seeing now.

• 17:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's very interesting what happens when the bar stool gets flipped upside down. So typically in society, what you want is someone's reputation and their status to be associated with their competence. And this is because people who are competent are valuable because they can do things, not the whole gamut of all of the different things that people can do. That is constrained by your ability to do something in reality. You can't fake being more competent than you are because people will just say, well, show me, show me this degree of competence. But if status is afforded to the people who are the biggest victims, you can fake, there is a bottomless pit of how low you can go with claiming victimhood. Well, this is the degree of psychological distress that I've gone through.

• 18:39Chris Williamson?

  This is the amount of trauma that I've suffered. This is the amount of whatever it is. Two things happen there. First off, it creates a very dangerous slippery slope status game because people can continue to just one up each other and make claims that aren't ever checked in the real world. And the second thing is people who actually do go through difficult times, they're part of a larger group of people, most of whom are made up of those that haven't actually been through something that justifies it. You are lumping in together, people who've been through really difficult times with people who just want to feel special.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it is a race. I mean, you described it. I mean, people are truly in a victimhood mindset and it's kind of like, well, I can outdo you because I have this status, I'm, I have this claim that I can make, I came from this, this background, or I have this ethnicity, or I have this in my, in my family background or whatever. And if you start considering this and you start changing your yardstick, you're in a

• 19:53Speaker 01

  lot of trouble because I can tell you if, if we start lowering standards and there are. Some schools that grade someone on math, for example, based on their willingness to learn it, their interest in learning it. What does that even mean? Well, I've had an interesting conversation about that recently.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  There was a professor that I won't name, I'll let him do that if he wants to. But he was talking about teaching black students, and he is black, standard English. And he caught all kinds of hell for it because they said he was being oppressive. And he said, "No, no, I'm not wanting to replace the way they communicate. I'm wanting to add to it." You know, they can talk in the way that they are in their neighborhoods and in the way they've been brought up. I just want to add a layer on that because if they go out into the world and they try to compete for jobs,

• 21:08Speaker 01

  they're going to need to speak the language of where they go. And he caught hell for that. And then they were talking about relative math scoring. And they were saying, "You have to grade them on their interest in learning it. If they don't care about it, then you can't grade them on the same standard as someone that's interested in it."

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Well, that is absurd to me. And, look, I don't want to get on an airliner and be flown by a pilot where they lowered the standard because they didn't have the background to master the skill set. I don't want to have brain surgery by someone who they lowered the standard for anatomy and physiology courses because they didn't get the proper background to prepare them for it. And they just fired an NYU professor after 20 or 30 years because the students were whining that the course was too hard. I don't want to be operated on by these, this was a pre-med course.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  I don't want to be operated on by someone who complained that the course was too hard. So they fired the professor and brought in some hack. That didn't require them to know everything they needed to know about brain structure. So now, uh, they're a resident and they're gonna do brain surgery on me. No, thank you. Uh, I don't wanna do, I don't want somebody fighting a fire at my house. That they lowered the standard on firefighting techniques because they didn't have all the opportunities as a child. I'm sorry, that's just not how you get by in this world.

• 22:54Chris Williamson?

  The problem is that academia and the qualifications and the standards that people are brought to in academia are malleable. They can continue to be moved, the A, the B, the C, all of this stuff can be positioned around to retrofit the desire, the motivation, the skill sets, the ability of the school. The problem is when you get into the real world, that bridge either stays up or it doesn't. And that plane either stays in the sky or it doesn't. And that brain surgery is either a success or it isn't. So yeah, you can continue to manipulate the standards to which students are being held. Up until the point at which they get into the real world. And as you say, you end up with some pretty, some pretty squirrely outcomes.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the problem with that is these kids are being taught that it is relative. It's not relative. You get out into the competitive world, it's like, you know, I grew up in athletics. It didn't matter who your parents were. It didn't matter what neighborhood you came from. They were interested in who could jump highest, who could run fastest, and who could knock somebody on their ass. That's what they were interested in. They didn't care about anything else. It didn't, it didn't matter. Um, that's what, and that's why, that's what I loved about athletics. It didn't matter how much money you had or who your parents were. It just mattered who could get the job done on a given day. And that was a real equalizer for me because we were really poor.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  And when I stepped onto that field, it didn't matter anymore. Uh, everybody was the same. You all started out the same and that was a great equalizer. And I, and I think that's great. And these kids who don't have, they don't show up having had the same experiences to get them ready uh, for admission to that school. Uh, if you're going to fix that problem, you need to go back at the beginning and fix that from pre-K forward. Uh, they might be in a neighborhood where the tax base is really low. So they don't get good schools. They don't get good resources. They don't good, get good teachers.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  That's where you need to fix that. You don't lower the standards when they get there. You go help those kids from the beginning. So when they show up, they are competitive. You know, all these schools have dropped the SAT now because they say it's racially biased. The research says that's not true. The research says that SAT is an opportunity for those gifted kids in the inner city, independent of their grades, to show that they in fact are gifted. And it's the one thing that can lift them out of that and put them into that school because it shows their native intelligence. But the schools won't re-implement it because they will be judged if they do.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  And they're more interested in virtue signaling than they are actually helping those underprivileged kids. That's the one thing that can povalt them right back into that school, even if they don't have the grades. They have the native intelligence, the, the motivation and the learning ability. Uh, but they won't use the SAT because they're virtue signaling and it's on the no good list.

• 26:14Chris Williamson?

  Well, it tells you everything you need to know that the SATs have been stopped, but legacy admissions haven't.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Right. And research is very clear. The SAT helps those underprivileged kids because it identifies those that have the brain power to jump up to that level.

• 26:33Chris Williamson?

  What's the problem with inclusive language?

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Well, it's gotten to the point of being ridiculous. Um, that it, there's, um, there, there are some of these, you, you, you can't, um, they're trying to

• 26:53Speaker 01

  so hard to not offend the victim class. So we can't say women anymore. We've got to say bodies with vaginas. You can't say hip, hip, parade anymore.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Uh, because it could offend people with a hip injury.

• 27:13Chris Williamson?

  You're kidding. That's not, that's not a thing. That's not a thing.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  It is a thing.

• 27:18Chris Williamson?

  That's not a thing.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  You can't have an admissions office at some universities now. You have to call it Office of Enrollment Management. Why? Because if you say admissions office, that suggests somebody's going to be rejected. So it's now has to be called, uh, Office of Enrollment Management. You can't now say, you, you can't now say rapist or murder

• 27:57Speaker 01

  suspect or convicted murderer. You have to say justice involved person. So you weren't raped. You were involved with a justice involved person.

• 28:10Chris Williamson?

  Injustice involved person, perhaps. Justice. This is wild.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  You can't say, you can't say minority anymore. You have to say historically excluded.

• 28:23Chris Williamson?

  I imagine the research for this book must have just been thrilling going through.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Oh, oh my God. Uh, bodies with vaginas, birthing people. Um, here's a good one for you.

• 28:35Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Here's a good one for you. Nibbling.

• 28:40Chris Williamson?

  Like the edge of a biscuit?

• 28:43Speaker 01

  No. Nibbling is a gender neutral term for your nieces and nephews.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  It's.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  It sounds like sibling, but it's nibbling.

• 28:57Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  And lunch and learn. You used to brown bag? Can't brown bag anymore. It's lunch and learn.

• 29:05Chris Williamson?

  I don't even know what that is, but no matter, no matter what it is, that how, just how widespread is this? Because we, I've seen these articles, I've seen these pieces about the insane new word that we need. We, they're menstruating people or the, the, the humans with smaller feet or whatever it is that you need to kind of repurpose. But just how widespread is this? Are these isolated incidents? Well, how big of a problem is it?

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Well,

• 29:35Speaker 01

  it's pretty widespread in universities and Fortune 500 corporations. You know, that's the problem. Chris, you get into,

• 29:48Speaker 01

  you know, I'm, I spent 21 years on the air at CBS and I'm still involved with CBS. I have

• 29:58Speaker 01

  a primetime show on Thursday nights at nine o'clock.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  So help me Todd, we've got another one in pre-production now. For their Paramount Plus, we've got other dramas and, and all that we work on with them and they air a lot of my library episodes. Still, so I'm, I'm still in business with them, but you, they have language police. I mean, it's words you can't say, words you need to say. They sign their letters with pronouns.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  It's the things that you, you, you can no longer say, America is the land of opportunity.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  You can no longer say the most qualified person should get the job. Because those trigger people that might not be the most qualified, so you can't upset them. And this is pretty rampant in major corporations and universities, just like trigger warnings. And you know, you, you asked me earlier, you said, well, you know, who is it that's pushing this? Well, I'm telling you who's pushing it. It's, it's, it's virtue signaling corporations and universities.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  And they're the ones that are shaping the minds of our young people and hiring them with expectations. I, I, I know a university professor that got a 90 day suspension, I believe without pay. Uh, because he was talking to a student that came up with a, was discussing a project and the, the project design, and he said, no, that's kind of lame. I don't think we should do that. The fact that he used the word lame got suspended for 90 days.

• 32:07Chris Williamson?

  It makes me so uncomfortable because I, again, I've read these news articles online, but it almost feels like fiction. It feels like some crazy outlier event that's not a big deal. And I don't know anybody that's been a part of this, and yet you've been exposed to them. You've had conversations with them. You've seen it firsthand in your own industry. And I guess, you know, my two worlds have been promoting nightclubs and doing a podcast. They may be the two final frontiers of free speech because no one on the front door of a nightclub or on a podcast really cares all that much about trigger warnings. So to me, it hasn't entered my sphere. It almost seems like a fantasy, and yet you're saying that it's happening in the real world.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's something like eighty percent of the universities have engaged in trigger warnings, but you're not involved in it because you're entrepreneurial. You work for you and you don't hold yourself to that ridiculous yardstick, that ridiculous standard. And when you're entrepreneurial, you're focused on results, not virtue signaling. And that's a great, that's a great place to be, Chris. I know, I've been entrepreneurial all my life, so. But if you're in a, if you're in a corporation and you got a bunch of board members and

• 33:33Speaker 01

  all that are really interested in signaling that they're really dialed in, it, it starts spreading and the universities are teaching this to our kids.

• 33:46Chris Williamson?

  So, a question that I've always had is how much of what we're seeing internally is coordination, it's part of some grand plan to try and take down America or to undo the will of the people or to confuse them or to make them feel like victims or narcissists or whatever it might be. How much of it is that? And how much of it is just cowardice from people who don't want to lose that job or just normal job anxiety? Oh, well, this is the new meta. This is the new meme that everybody needs to follow. This is toxic compassion or performative empathy and this is what I need to do in order to be able to keep my job. I don't want to lose my job, so I'll just comply. How much of it is coordination, do you think, and how much of it is job anxiety?

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Well, I, I think these, these fringe activists are very coordinated. I think they use bot armies. I think they scare people and threaten people. And I think a lot of people are like, hey, it's a lot easier to just. Don't say anything. It's a lot easier to just keep my mouth shut, keep my head down and go on. But I tell you what, I think that that pendulum is starting to swing back the other way. And if you wonder if people are really buying into all of this, you can look and see how they vote when they can vote silently, like with their wallet.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  You saw what happened at Target when they had the tuck friendly clothing for children. I mean, up right there for children to walk by. You saw what happened with Bud Light when they pushed the transgender. And I think most people are like, hey, live and let live. If this person is transgender and that's what they want to do,

• 35:42Speaker 01

  who am I to say what they should or shouldn't do? But when you start pushing the agenda and say, it's not enough that you're okay with what I do. I need you to stand up and announce that you endorse this. It's not enough that you just live and let live. You gotta stand up and tell everybody that you endorse what I'm doing. Then they're pushing to the point that people are gonna say enough is enough and too much is too much. You don't get to tell me what I'm supposed to do. I don't, I don't need you to endorse what I'm doing and don't demand that I endorse what you're doing. And I think that a lot of these activists do not speak for who they say they represent.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Because I've had a lot of people in these groups that say, they're not talking for me.

• 36:32Chris Williamson?

  This sounds perilously close to what Jordan Peterson was warning everybody about six, seven, eight years ago even.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Well, it is in that he was saying that the Canadian government is requiring that you use this language, and he was saying, "I will not be compelled by the government to say what you're going to tell me I should say." And that's not happening here, and it's even worse, I think, because we do have freedom of speech with the First Amendment. We're muzzling each other. I mean, I feel like I'm in George Orwell's 1984 sometimes, when I'm seeing us requiring each other to use certain language and certain words. We're doing it to each other. It's not the government coming in and stepping on our rights.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  It's we're muzzling each other. We're requiring each other to do certain things, rather than allowing people to do what they want to do.

• 37:33Chris Williamson?

  What about the dangers of rewriting as well?

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I've heard that referred to as woke-washing. And I've seen some of the books, like Huckleberry Finn, which have been rewritten. And it changes the meaning of the book so much that it... They changed the book so much that the meaning of the book has changed. And the whole... My reading of the book was that it was a commentary on racism at the time. I mean, even when it was written, it was...

• 38:17Speaker 01

  It would certainly be a criticism of racism by today's standards. It was a criticism of it at the time. But they're going to take that out. How is a reader, a child that's reading that book, a teen that's reading that book, going to learn the lesson in the book if you take it out? I don't understand that. I don't get that. It doesn't make sense to me. And I see them tearing down statues and changing the names on some of the schools

• 38:58Speaker 01

  because these people owned slaves, well, you have to now say enslaved person,

• 39:07Speaker 01

  250 years ago. Well, you know what? That's something that I refer to in the book as presentism. Not my term. I learned it from someone else.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  And that very simply is taking today's standards, mores and folkways, and applying it to something that happened 250 years ago as though 250 years ago, they were supposed to say, "Two centuries in the future, this is going to be different, so I need to foretell the future and hold myself to that standard." Was that abominable behavior? Yes, of course it was abominable behavior. Was it our proudest moment in American history? Of course it was. It was terrible.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  The way these people were treated and abused and sold was horrible. Do we want to hide that from our children growing up now and learning the history of America? You can't hide that. How are they gonna learn?

• 40:21Chris Williamson?

  That is the lesson, right?

• 40:23Speaker 01

  That is the lesson. I mean, they're tearing down statues of people that crafted the Declaration of Independence. They're tearing down Lincoln, who wrote the

• 40:41Speaker 01

  It's more than I can take sometimes. But presentism is like, let's say there's a street in your neighborhood and the speed limit is 20. So you drive through there 20 for days and days and days, for months and months and months. And then they come along and say, well, we're going to change it to 10. Well, you think there's a lot of kids that have moved in the neighborhood, we're going to change it to 10. So they come and give you a retroactive ticket for driving 10 over. You, well, wait a minute, the speed limit was 10 at the time, was 20 at the time. Well, it's 10 now, so we're giving you retroactive tickets because you were driving 20. But it was 20 when I was doing 20.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  I know, but it's 10 now. You should have known we were going to change it to 10. So we're ticketing you for driving 20 when it was 20. That's what they're doing now. It's like, we're going to criticize you and tear down your statue because you were doing what was acceptable at the time because it is not acceptable now.

• 41:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, judging, judging the people of yesterday by the standards of today, especially when the standards are moving unbelievably quickly, is never going to be a good idea. No one is able to live up to, in fact, very few people are able to live up to the standards of today from today. You know, there's even, I have seen a lot of conversations online that people from the trans community, the LGBT community, talking about some of the different ways that it can be confusing to understand pronouns, or it can be, I understand that it's challenging too. I get it wrong as well. It's like, look, if you, person who is supposed to be the arbiter of truth right now gets it wrong, there's no surprise that people would have gotten this wrong previously. The thing that's interesting are the trends that I think.

• 42:35Chris Williamson?

  Seems new, genuinely novel and new, is how cemented people are in their beliefs, how much less open they seem to be about changing their mind, that if they have a belief that is intrinsic to their sense of self, they hold on to it tightly, they do not want to change it, if they do, that's admitting failure and looks like destruction and they can't deal with it. How much truth do you think there is in saying that people are less open minded now than they were before?

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Oh, I think they're very entrenched. I think it's confirmation bias. They look for what reinforces their existing belief and they are really closed off to new information. And you said it very well when you said it's changing so fast, it's hard to keep up with it now. If I'm doing a show that has to do with the LGBTQ community, I have researchers

• 43:42Speaker 01

  that check the glossary for what is preferred or acceptable now, even if I did it a month ago, because it may have changed. And, look, I want to be respectful. I mean, if this is the language system they have, I want to be respectful in describing it. I even said in the book, I said, I'm going to try and describe this the way I think they look at this now. And I'm not setting up a paper tiger. I'm going to try and give you as real

• 44:23Speaker 01

  an explanation of how I think they describe sex versus gender now versus what they did before. And if I'm wrong, go to this website and check it to get it, because I'm not trying to say this wrong. But in this day and time, what they try to do is catch, we used to say catch somebody red handed. Now we say catch somebody with the wrong word in their mouth. It's not, it's not what they really feel. It's just catch a misspeaking and jump on that bandwagon.

• 44:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  And they really get, they really alienate a lot of real allies. If they catch somebody saying something the wrong way, it might be somebody that's actually a huge supporter that just out of ignorance said something the wrong way or misspoke. And I think it is hard to keep up sometimes with what's acceptable terminology. I mean, I try to do it just out of respect and maybe I get it wrong sometimes. Maybe I don't. I don't know. I try.

• 45:30Chris Williamson?

  Well, I suppose, again, the problem here is that if there is status associated to being a victim, there is an incentive for somebody to find victimhood even where there isn't any. And I guess the other side is that people know that most people are trying their best most of the time. I think I fundamentally believe that most people are good. The issue is, I don't think the people that are enforcing these rules are particularly good. So they use their own theory of mind, which is, deep down, I don't think I'm a good person. Deep down, I know that the things that I say publicly and the things that I believe privately are the same thing. They understand that they're playing this game. They understand that it's narcissistic and manipulative and aggressive and malign

• 46:11Chris Williamson?

  and all the rest of it. And they then port that same theory of mind onto everybody else. That means that when, when someone messes up out of good faith, they don't see it in good faith. Oh, here's the, the smoking gun that tells us that Dr. Phil is the racist, transphobic, bigot, homophobic, Zionist, whatever that we always knew that he was, and this is proof of it. It's like, is it that? Or is it just that language is imprecise?

• 46:36Speaker 01

  No, I think some of it's even worse. I think some of it is larcenous because if they can catch someone like me using a wrong word or saying something that they can say, okay, this runs afoul of the current ideology, then that's like gold because if they can jump on my coattail, if they catch Joe Blow saying it wrong, that's not much good. They catch me saying it wrong, you're gonna get a lot of headlines.

• 47:11Chris Williamson?

  How nervous does this make you feel? You know, you've spoken about this. I asked you right at the top. You're in the midst of it, right? You are patient zero for mainstream media. There is a lot of it around you, lots of plays, lots of notoriety associated with it. What's that like? What's personally, what's that like for you on a daily basis to be walking on eggshells?

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Well, I don't walk on eggshells. I've said before, there's good news and bad news when you're dealing with me. The good news is if I'm involved in something, it's likely to get a lot of attention. The bad news is if I'm involved in something, it's likely to get a lot of attention. So that's why, I mean, really, if they can get, if they can get me in a headline, then they get a lot of mileage out of it. So it can be, you know, Dr. Phil's gardener has a wreck. I mean, my gardener can have a wreck 30 miles

• 48:13Speaker 01

  from my house and it won't be Bob Jenkins has a wreck. It'll be Dr. Phil's gardener has a wreck. I could have been in Europe at the time, but the headline will be, and I swear, I could, I could stop on Sunset to get a kitten out of traffic. And the headline will be, Dr. Phil arrogantly blocks traffic on Sunset because they just get mileage out of it. So I've learned a long time ago that you can't make everybody happy, so you might as well do what you truly believe. And as long as I know in my heart who I am and what my intentions are.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Somebody prostituting that just doesn't bother me.

• 49:03Chris Williamson?

  I don't think there's anything particularly new about that. I think, yes, maybe this has been amped up a little bit, but the news has always been in the clickbait business. They've just got better at it. It's a case of headlines, whatever the most aggressive, fear-stoking, limbically hijacking wordage that they can come up with. That's what they're going to go for. And that's the way that that's the way that it's always been.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  And I don't know what this, I'll butcher the saying, but it is the true, the, a lie travels around the world while the truth is still lacing up its shoes. It's something like that. And there's actually been a study about that. I think MIT did it. And it, it actually measured this and a lie travels six times faster than the truth. And the reason for that is a lie is simple and quick and black and white. And the truth is never that clean. It's never that quick. It's more complicated. So a lie is good clickbait. It's a clean headline and so it travels real quick.

• 50:12Chris Williamson?

  Have you heard of Brandalini's law? It's also called the bullshit asymmetry principle. It says, it says that it takes far less energy to produce bullshit than to refute it. Therefore, the world is filled with unrefuted bullshit.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I believe it.

• 50:28Chris Williamson?

  What about, talk to me about family. I know this is something that's very important to you. Is there actually an attack on family at the moment?

• 50:36Speaker 01

  You know, I, I think there is, and I'm so sensitive to it because I think family is the backbone of America. I think the family unit is, is the backbone of America. And if families are strong, and by strong, I mean, there are good family relationships. Kids have a good relationship with their parents. They stay in contact. They, they have, I mean, while they're together, they have meals together, they communicate together. I'll give you a tragic example of this, which will speak volumes. There's something going around right now called sextortion. And most people won't know what that mean. You probably do.

• 51:21Chris Williamson?

  Even I know, no, even me, the terminally online guy doesn't know what this is.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Well, this and AI has, you know, I told you I'm gonna have to start dealing with AI as things evolve. What's happening is these, these people are generating images. Some of them, they may have stolen from somewhere and some of them they generate uh completely made up. And they get online and start talking to a young man. And they send him this image of a girl. They talk to him like they're a fourteen or fifteen year old girl.

• 52:02Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it's like, it's like AI catfishing.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. They send him a picture. They start talking to him and say, you know, I like you so much. I want to send you a picture. So they send him a nude photo. And it's like, I, I've shown you mine, you show me yours. Uh, I've shown you my body, you show me yours. And he's like, well, I'm not gonna blow this. So he does. He, he sends her one back. The second they get it, they write back and say, I am not a fourteen year old girl. And I now have a naked picture of you and I'm gonna send it to your parents. All the people in your contact list, your pastor, I've got your school yearbook. I'm gonna send this to everybody and humiliate you if you don't send me ten thousand dollars right now.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  And I did three or four stories about that last week and one of them uh killed himself in an hour and forty minutes. He panicked and thought, oh my God, I'm, I'm gonna humiliate my parents and myself. He killed himself almost immediately. Another one killed himself in a matter of a few days. Uh, they, it was just horrible. I mean, just absolutely horrible. Why? Because there was a time when families were so tight that if something happened to one of them, it happened to all of them. And you would go to your family with, with anything and it was all together. And now there's, we're, the relationships are so distant.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  They don't feel that way anymore. And these kids felt alone. They felt they couldn't do it. And then we had a few examples there who did go to their parents. And say, hey, I screwed up big time. Uh, here's what happened. And so their parents said, well, that don't even talk to them anymore. Just cut them off. And, and of course, the answer to that, if you get caught in that trap, is it was an AI-generated picture. All you gotta do is say, that's not me. I wish that was me. Please send it to everybody. I don't care. And hang up. And I mean, you're out of it. But uh, kids don't think that way and they panic.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  And that's because they don't have that relationship with their parents, with their family. I always tell parents, talk to your kids about things that don't matter. So that line is open when it comes time to talk about things that do. You gotta do that. You gotta have it where you can talk about anything.

• 54:45Chris Williamson?

  Does this suggest that family is under attack, though? Is this not just a a natural consequence downstream of there's more things to distract people. They can watch Netflix or play video games or or go on social media. How much of this is an actual

• 55:04Chris Williamson?

  purposeful attack?

• 55:07Speaker 01

  There are six billion views of the hashtags toxic parent, toxic family, toxic mother on social media platforms right now. Six billion views of them peddling no contact, toxic parent, toxic family. Yeah, it's under attack. People are out there selling that sort of mentality. And these are people that don't know come here from go sick them about family dynamics or how to heal a family

• 55:46Speaker 01

  or anything about keeping a relationship open or what the consequences are if you cut off your family. And if you do, and it's two years later and you're now alone and lost and depressed.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Let me ask you where those people will be then. You'll be able to find them in two weeks with a flashlight because they're gone. They don't know squat about nothing. They're just on there spewing out blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 56:18Chris Williamson?

  Give me some white pills then. What are the, what are the principles that people can use to rely on to be more resilient? There's a lot of bad outcomes at the moment that we've gone through. What are the ways that people can fight back?

• 56:31Speaker 01

  Well, that's because you ask questions about problems. That's why we've gone through bad outcomes. Ask me something happy, like the one you just asked. Number one, be who you are on purpose. That, I talk in the book about 10 principles of a healthy society and number one is be who you are on purpose. Look, you don't want to be reactive to society. Don't just get up and whatever comes your way on the internet or at work or your friends. Don't be

• 57:11Speaker 01

  a sheep. Be who you are on purpose. And that means you've got to star in your own life. And I don't care. You know, people say, well, that's easy for you to say, Dr. Phil. You've had your own TV show for 25 years. So yeah, it's easy to start your own life. I don't care if you're a plumber or a teacher or an architect or an accountant or whatever. Star in your own life. You've got people in your life. You've got children. You've got friends. You've got parents. You've got a church. You've got a team you play with. Star in your own life. And that, that means you've got to decide what's important to you. And I'm not telling you

• 57:53Speaker 01

  about being selfish. It's not selfish to take care of yourself because you can't give away what you don't have. If you don't take care of yourself, if you don't love yourself, if you don't nurture yourself, you can't love and nurture other people. So if you let yourself get emotionally bankrupt.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  Then you have nothing to give to other people. So be who you are on purpose. Don't let the internet program you. Don't let some ideology program you. Choose who you want to be and what you think is important. That is, that to me is so critical. And I, I, I think you, you pair that up with the thought that make all, choose all behaviors based on results and all thoughts based on rationality.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  And rationality means is this thought based on fact?

• 59:03Speaker 01

  Is it, does it get me what I want? Does it protect and prolong my life? I mean, there, there are just simple tests that you can ask yourself. Is, is this really something that, that makes sense? Easy questions you can ask yourself when you're thinking something. Is this, is this factual? Have I verified this or is this something I'm telling myself?

• 59:32Speaker 01

  Does it get me what I want? Does it protect and prolong my life? These are things that you, that you can ask yourself. So choose your behaviors based on, people always teasing me about saying, how's that working for you? That's a pretty damn good question to be asking you. If you're doing something, how's it working for you? If it ain't working, change what you're doing.

• 59:59Chris Williamson?

  I love the, I love the idea of focusing on solving problems rather than winning arguments. I see so much, so much of the discourse online is all about winning arguments rather than solving problems. Here's a really interesting example, something I noticed on Twitter, which is, Very rarely do you ever see someone concede a point and say, oh, actually, that's, that's really interesting that you said that. I'd never seen that. I didn't, I didn't see that before. And there's two, two reasons. First one being that admitting defeat online is tantamount to destruction. It's embarrassing. It's lame. You're supposed to have this perfectly robust, walled off fortress of whatever your philosophical worldview is. And the second one is that most of the rhetoric is so adversarial and mean and

• 1:00:43Chris Williamson?

  cutting and sardonic that who entering into that type of an exchange wants to admit that they're wrong? It's like, you've just taken the piss out of me for a full thread of tweets. I'm not going to say, oh, yeah, good one, Dr. Phil. Thanks for really resetting my worldview. I'm going to say, no, you just called me a name before, so I'm going to call you a name and I'm not going to believe what you say.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and I'll, I'll challenge you to look at my threads and responses because I'll have people call me everything but decent. And they get some good ones on there. And those are usually the ones I respond to if, if I respond. And I don't sit and type them myself. I have somebody I tell, I say, all right, write this down because I type like, so I have my guy and I'll say, all right, take this down. And I tell them, first off, hey, thank you for caring enough to share your thoughts because it took time

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  for you to respond. And I disagree with a lot of what you said, but I hear you and I, I hope you'll consider this and fact check me. And if, if there are some things I said that are not factual, then come back to me with it and let's, let's talk about that. Because I had somebody the other day said, oh, I thought you were really into facts and now I see you saying this. I mean, like, I'll never, I'll never follow you

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  again. And I said, well, hey, thanks for saying that. You didn't have to respond at all. You could have just cut me off, but. Please fact check me and send me what it is that I'm wrong about. And if I am, I'll correct it and, and tell you, and let's keep this dialogue open. And um, he hasn't responded yet.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  Because when I, when, when I'm doing something on a show, um, I'll figure out what I'm gonna say and do. And I have what we call a brain room. And these are college professors I've hired from around the country. And they're all over the political spectrum. And I'll have them research something. And they'll send all of that to me and then I'll work out the points I'm gonna make. And, and I'll send that back to them and say, is this supportable? And they'll say, well, yes, no, or maybe. And I'll get down to what there's absolute empirical support for.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  And then when I do the actual show, I send the transcript to them to check. And make sure I didn't conflate two things that weren't meant to be or whatever. And if I've said something that is not what was intended or is not supportable, it comes out. So they check it before I do it. And then I check the, they check the points I intend to make. And then they check the transcript afterwards. And then it goes to air. So I triple check things with a research room before I ever say it. And that book has been scrubbed top, side, and bottom, let me tell you. Cause I want to, let me tell you, I want to be the place that deals with facts.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  I, I, and if it's an opinion, I say so. I say, all right, now I'm, there aren't, this isn't one that lends itself to facts. This is just opinion, so I'm gonna give you mine. Take it for what you will. I identify it if it's that way. Otherwise, I, I give them the empirical data.

• 1:04:40Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean when you say, do not stay silent just so others can remain comfortable?

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  What you said earlier about, I wonder how many people are just kind of biting their tongue because they don't want to take the heat. And I say, I don't think we can do that. I think we, it's time we got to speak up.

• 1:04:58Chris Williamson?

  Dr. Phil, ladies and gentlemen, I really appreciate you coming on. I very much respect the fact that you're going through all of these hurdles in an effort to try and be balanced. I think it's, uh, in some ways sad that you need to do that just to protect yourself from being caught out in the wrong, the wrong, uh, statement. And also, given the fact that you reach millions and millions and millions of people, it's also important because if we're struggling with information and the quality of information, then the people who reach the most people should be trying to communicate it in the most accurate way possible. So yeah, it's a very impressive way to live out your philosophy.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I think if people are going to honor me with their time, I owe it to them to do my homework. And, uh, so I, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do the best I can and I won't always get it right. And when I do, I'll correct it and hopefully catch it before it goes out. And if not, I'll, I'll say so. So, uh, I really enjoyed this conversation. You asked some, uh, challenging questions, Chris. So I really appreciate it.

• 1:06:02Chris Williamson?

  I appreciate you too. Thank you, Dr.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  You have to, you have to come up and see us sometime and, um, I'll be down your way pretty soon. I've got some, I got a lot of friends down there. Ron White and Joe Rogan and some other guys down there that I hang with. So, uh,

• 1:06:14Chris Williamson?

  Come through, we'll do barbecue. We can play pickleball. We can do all of the Austin things.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  All right. Good deal.